Potsdam, Eric. 1997. English
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Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society.Amherst, Ma.: GLSA,
University of
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353-368.

Potsdam, Eric. 1995. Phrase
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Projects

"Collaborative
Research:
Variation in
Control Structures". This National Science Foundation-funded project
was
joint work with Maria Polinsky at Harvard University. The project time
period was March 2002 to August 2006.

Control constructions
have been at
the fore of syntactic and semantic theorizing for the last thirty
years, and
the research into the syntax and semantics of Control constructions has
led to
important results in the domain of clausal complementation. Most
theoretical
research on Control has built heavily on the facts of English and a
small
number of other well-studied, typologically similar languages. Such
theories of
Control account for the canonical English Control pattern, Sandy
tried _ to
remain calm.The
core
property of this construction is a Forward Control relation: an
obligatory
interpretational dependency between an overt argument NP and a lower
unpronounced argument in the complement clause. In the proposed study,
we will
investigate variation in the structural realization of this Control
relation
which we believe is cross-linguistically attested and which we also
believe has
important implications for syntactic theory. A Backward Control
relation is a
similar, obligatory interpretational dependency in which the overt
argument NP
is in the lower position and the higher argument is unpronounced.
Backward
Control has been proposed in the literature for constructions in
Japanese,
Brazilian Portuguese, Tsez (Nakh-Dagestanian), Korean, Malagasy, and
other
languages.

The goal of this project
is to
explore the empirical and theoretical issues surrounding Backward
Control phenomena. In the
empirical domain, we will further document Backward
Control constructions
cross-linguistically. We will carry out in-depth investigations of
attested
Backward Control structures across several selected languages and, with
the aid
of graduate and undergraduate research assistants, we will seek out
additional
examples and simultaneously develop a database of control patterns in
selected
language families. In the theoretical domain, we will examine the
implications
of our empirical findings for existing theories of Control and for
syntactic
theory more generally. Theoretical work will center on whether or not
current
theories permit the structures that we document and, if they do not,
what
modifications are necessary to permit the range of observed variation
while
still maintaining restrictiveness. Overall, the proposed project will
contribute to an understanding of the range of variation in Control
structures
that are attested in natural language.